Purposes of the Undergraduate Labs

I suppose that the title of this page is perhaps misleading; I'm not going to tell any of you what your purpose in coming to the labs is or should be. I'm sure you all have individual things you'd like to get out of these labs, or maybe you'd prefer to just get out of them altogether. It's not my job to force you to love physics or love doing these lab experiments. So what is my job, and what am I trying to do in helping teach these labs? That I will talk a bit about.

I'm a physicist; or at least, I'm on my way to becoming one, depending on where you put the line. So that makes me a little prejudiced: I absolutely love physics. I'm hoping that some of that love and enthusiasm will come across; sometimes it's difficult when the equipment isn't working right or the experiment just seems pointless.

I don't want everyone to necessarily run to the administration and change their majors to physics (although for many folks their fear of physics is only due to their lack of proper exposure to it...). There are, however, a few things that I will be trying to get across to you during the semester:

Physics is driven by a search for patterns, some sort of order which can help us generalize why things work and then go beyond observation to explain and predict things we haven't yet seen or tried. There's no particular reason, to my knowledge, for wanting order and patterns over disorder and illogicality, other than the simple fact that so far nobody's come up with a reliable way to predict all that much based on disorder and irrationality.
You can listen to lectures all you want, but some concepts just don't become real until you see them in action for yourself, and play with the conditions to see what happens.
In physics, conveying what you have seen or learned to others is pretty important. If you've noticed some neat effect, well then that's great, but if you can't describe or reproduce it then its usefulness is limited. That's why the emphasis on completeness and data analysis; there's a big difference between 50 cows in a field plus or minus 5, and 50 cows in the field plus or minus 40, and you don't want others to get warped ideas about any results you come up with.

Beyond that, these labs give you some experience working with equipment that may not be familiar, and that you may never encounter again, but it's still useful experience and you never know when you'll run into a situation which can be somehow helped by something you've learned along the way.

Anyway, as a final note, if you're in my section remember that there are no completely useless questions. If you don't know, ask! If I don't know, then I'll tell you so, but if I do know then I'll do my best to explain it. If my answer really doesn't make any sense, ask me again: I am known to sometimes be in a weird mood and give the first or most interesting answer that comes to mind; if asked a second time, I'll be a little more serious.

I didn't want to put above that one of the purposes of the labs is to have fun, since by and large you're probably not going to agree with me on that; however, I hope you'll come in with an attitude that especially this semester, when we get to play with lasers and hydrogen arc lamps and the like, there can be some really interesting and even fun aspects to the experiments.